Hegemony, class struggle and the radical historiography of global monetary standards

This article suggests that the radical historiography of global monetary standards has failed to provide a class-based interpretation, instead offering a radicalised power politics that seeks to explain their rise and fall as being a by-product of the competitive struggle for hegemony by capitalist states. The author proposes an alternative reading, which locates the contradictory and antagonistic class relation between capital and labour as the central dynamic force accounting for the rise and fall of global monetary standards, from the classical gold standard to the collapse of Bretton Woods.